במדבר 4:4-8
זֹאת עֲבֹדַת בְּנֵי־קְהָת בְּאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד קֹדֶשׁ הַקֳּדָשִׁים׃
וּבָא אַהֲרֹן וּבָנָיו בִּנְסֹעַ הַמַּחֲנֶה וְהוֹרִדוּ אֵת פָּרֹכֶת הַמָּסָךְ וְכִסּוּ־בָהּ אֵת אֲרֹן הָעֵדֻת וְנָתְנוּ עָלָיו כְּסוּי עוֹר תַּחַשׁ וּפָרְשׂוּ בֶגֶד־כְּלִיל תְּכֵלֶת מִלְמָעְלָה וְשָׂמוּ בַּדָּיו׃ וְעַל שֻׁלְחַן הַפָּנִים יִפְרְשׂוּ בֶּגֶד תְּכֵלֶת וְנָתְנוּ עָלָיו אֶת־הַקְּעָרֹת וְאֶת־הַכַּפֹּת וְאֶת־הַמְּנַקִּיֹּת וְאֵת קְשׂוֹת הַנָּסֶךְ וְלֶחֶם הַתָּמִיד עָלָיו יִהְיֶה׃ וּפָרְשׂוּ עֲלֵיהֶם בֶּגֶד תּוֹלַעַת שָׁנִי וְכִסּוּ אֹתוֹ בְּמִכְסֵה עוֹר תָּחַשׁ וְשָׂמוּ אֶת־בַּדָּיו׃
This shall be the service of the sons of Qehat in the Tent of Meeting, namely, the most holy things:
and when the camp sets forward, Aharon shall come, and his sons, and they shall take down the veil of the screen, and cover the ark of testimony with it: and they shall put on it the covering of tachash skins, and shall spread over it a cloth wholly of blue, and shall put in its poles. And upon the table of showbread they shall spread a cloth of blue, and put on it the dishes, and the spoons, and the bowls, and the jars for pouring out: and the continual bread shall be on it: and they shall spread upon them a cloth of scarlet, and cover the same with a covering of tachash skins, and shall put in its poles.
From here.
At the end of this week’s parsha, we read about the tachach, which was to cover the Mishkan in the desert. The tachash had already been mentioned earlier in Sefer Shemot (25:5) as one of the building materials, but in chapter four of Bamidbar it gets no fewer than seven mentions, the most in any chapter of Tanach. (Fun fact, it is also mentioned in Bereshit (22:24) as the name of one of Avraham’s nephews. More in this at the end.) And so this week we will focus on the tachash, and the many suggestions as to its identity.
The many translations of the Tachash
Let’s start with one of the newest translations, and one of the most interesting: the Koren Tanach of the Land of Israel. It uses “a new translation of the entire Tanakh, produced by a team of scholars who remained true to the original text while also being consistent with modern language, idioms, and readability expectations….Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was the primary contributor to the Torah translation…” (The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel, Exodus xvii). It translated tachash as “fine leather” Here is the footnote:
The use of the word tachash in Ezekiel (16:10) clearly implies that the it was used in making exquisite shoes:
וָאַלְבִּישֵׁךְ רִקְמָה וָאֶנְעֲלֵךְ תָּחַשׁ וָאֶחְבְּשֵׁךְ בַּשֵּׁשׁ וַאֲכַסֵּךְ מֶשִׁי
“I clothed thee also with embroidered cloth, and shod thee with tachash skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk.”
Let’s take a look at the other suggestions.
The Jerusalem Talmud
In the Yerushalmi there are at least five differing opinions (and six different translations) as to the nature of the tachash.
2:3 ירושלמי שבת
רִבִּי יוּדְה רִבִּי נְחֶמְיָה וְרַבָּנִן. רִבִּי יְהוּדָה אוֹמֵר. טִיינוֹן. לְשֵׁם צִבְעוֹ נִקְרָא. וְרִבִּי נְחֶמְיָה אָמַר גלקטינן. וְרַבָּנִן אָֽמְרִין. מִין חַיָּה טְהוֹרָה וְגִדּוּלָּהּ בַּמִּדְבָּר. וַתְייָא כַּיי דָּמַר רִבִּי אֶלְעָזָר בֵּירִבִּי יוֹסֵי רִבִּי אַבָּהוּ בְשֵׁם רִבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן לָקִישׁ בְּשֵׁם רִבִּי מֵאִיר. כְּמִין חַיָּה טְהוֹרָה בָּרָא הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא לְמֹשֶׁה בַּמִּדְבָּר. כֵּיוָן שֶׁעָשָׂה בָהּ מְלֶאכֶת הַמִּשְׁכָּן נִגְנְזָה. רִבִּי אָבוּן אָמַר. קֶרֶשׁ הָיָה שְׁמָהּ. תַּנֵּי רִבִּי הוֹשַׁעְיָה. דְּחָדָא קֶרֶן. וְתִיטַ֣ב לָ֭יי מִשּׁ֥וֹר פָּ֗ר מַקְרִין וּמַפְרִֽיס. מִקֶּרֶן כָתַב רַחֲמָנָא.
1. Rebbi Yehudah says, it was the color called taynin; and so it was called thus because of its color.
2. Rebbi Nehemiah said, blue [or, according to Jastrow, “it was the fur of the ermine weasel imported by the Axeinoi (γαλῆ Ἀξεινῶν).”
3. But the Rabbis say, a kind of pure animal which grows up in the desert.
4…Rebbi Meir said: The Holy One, praise to Him, created for Moses in the desert a kind of tahor animal. After the work of the Tabernacle had been finished it was hidden. Rebbi Abun said, its name was tachash.
5. Rebbi Hoshaia stated, a unicorn.
So according to Rebbi Yehudah, the tachash was the color of ordinary goat skins that were dyed. This Rebbi Yehudah is the second century Galilean Rebbi Yehuda bar Ilai, whose teacher was Rabbi Akiva (among others). He is likely echoing the Greek translation of the Bible known as the Septuagint, which was written around the middle of the third century BCE. Whenever the word tachash appears, be it in Shemot, Bamidbar or Ezekiel, the Septuagint translated it as δέρματα ὑακίνθινα, dermata huakinthina or “skins the color of hyacinths,” which is to say, a bluish purple.
It is not clear if Rebbi Nehemia is suggesting that the actual skin came from a weasel, or came from a kosher animals whose hide was then dyed white. The Rabbis, perhaps disagreeing with him, suggest it was a kosher animal found only in the desert.
Rebbi Hoshaia’s suggests that the tachash was a unicorn - חָדָא קֶרֶן. In fact, the Midrash Tanchuma (Terumah 6) records our Rebbi Yehudah as also identifying the tachash with a unicorn. Here is the Midrash:
Unnamed London doctor’s poster from the seventeenth century.
וְעֹרֹת אֵילִם מְאָדָּמִים וְעֹרֹת תְּחָשִׁים... רַבִּי יְהוּדָה אוֹמֵר: חַיָּה טְהוֹרָה גְּדוֹלָה הָיְתָה בַּמִּדְבָּר וְקֶרֶן אַחַת הָיָה לָהּ בְּמִצְחָהּ, וּבְעוֹרָהּ שִׁשָּׁה גְּוָנִים, וְנָטְלוּ אוֹתָהּ וְעָשׂוּ מִמֶּנָּה יְרִיעוֹת
This is the offering … and rams’ skins dyed red, and tachashim (Exod. 25:3)….R. Judah said: It was a large pure animal, with a single horn in its forehead and a skin of six different colors that roamed the desert
This is not as silly as it sounds. As we noted in detail elsewhere, as late as the seventeenth century unicorns were widely believed to exist, and some physicians, (or better, quacks), marketed medicine from powder alleged to have been ground from the horn of the unicorn.
“I am sure I am not the only Assyriologist whose heart has sunk every time any form of the word appeared. There seemed to be such a lot of information, but it did not allow a consistent translation or understanding. The word seemed determined to resist the repeated assaults of scholarship.
”
The last word goes to…Stephanie Dalley
Back in 2000, Dr. Stephanie Dalley, a retired Oxford Assyriologist, published what is still the definitive paper on the identification of the tachash. After discussing some other possibilities that include badgers, dolphins and dugongs, she focussed on the Sumerian word duh.si.a, (spelled also duh.su.a in Mari texts and in Hittite)
What did duhsu mean in Akkadian? It was an unusual word in that it was preceded sometimes by the sign for stone, at other times by the sign for leather, wool or linen. This sign, whether stone, leather, wool or linen, was taken to be a determinative, in other words it was not pronounced and did not affect the declension of the following duhsu. In this respect it was not comparable to 'or tahas in which the first word is in the construct before the second word in the genitive. But there is reason to question whether any of the Akkadian signs written in front of duhsu is a determinative, partly because so many different materials occur, and partly because duhsu always occurs in the genitive case when it is phonetically spelt. In other words, duhsu might be a description applied to different materials, and not the material itself.
Moving on from memories of high school genitives and derminatives (never a strong point of mine), it is the last sentence that sums it up: “duhsu might be a description applied to different materials, and not the material itself.” She continues:
Twenty years after his first attempts to understand the word, Oppenheim published some Middle Assyrian and later recipes in cuneiform for making glass or faience. 'Stone-duhsu was one of the products, but he was perplexed to find it in eight or more hues. He was forced to conclude that duhsu essentially stood for a colour with a wide variety of shades. None of the known words for glass and faience was used with the recipe for stone-duhsu, and it was supposed that a natural stone, whatever it was, was being imitated chemically. It is generally accepted that faience and glass aimed to imitate the colours of real stones, and Akkadian texts often write of 'mountain' lapis lazuli, i.e. the real stuff, alongside (artificial) lapis lazuli, both types being preceded by the determinative for stone.
It gets better:
Dr Gillian Eastwood-Vogelsang in Leiden, working on the clothing in the tomb of Tutankhamun, has identified specific items imported from western Asia, by certain features of design. One of those items consists of beaded sandals which she describes as 'embellished with an intricate design of gold bosses and beadwork in carnelian, turquoise and possibly lapis lazuli'. In the Amarna letter EA 22 the Mittanian king sent to Akhenaten one pair of duhsu-shoes, studded with ornaments of gold, of hiliba-stone, etc. If duhsu here means some kind of beadwork, the description would match not only Tutankhamun's sandals but also certain beaded objects which have been found intact on excavations in Mesopotamia. In the royal tomb of queen Pu-abi at Ur in the third millennium BCE, a leather-based headdress had a background of tiny lapis lazuli beads attached, as a background to set off larger attachments which included gold animals, fruits and rosettes. Faience beads resembling dates have been found at El-Amarna, and they might be thought to correspond to the Akkadian lexical text listing stone uhinnu-dztes of duhsu?''
And now we are ready for her conclusion:
As a result of these correspondences between vocabulary and excavated objects, it seems very probable that duhsu is a general word which refers to coloured beads and inlays made of glass and faience in imitation of certain kinds of stone, perhaps in the first instance blue, and then perhaps more generally to multi-coloured beadwork…
Hebrew tahas is cognate with Hurrian / Akkadian / Sumerian duhsu. It denotes beading and attaching pendants, and inlaying in stone, metal, faience and glass, and is usually made on leather but sometimes also wool or linen, or as cloisonné in precious metals, timber, etc.
The profession which manufactured them was not involved in dyeing leather, but was a refiner of frit, faience and glass, who shaped beads and inlays, and designed the iconography of ceremonial armour and harness, awnings for royal boats, ceremonial necklaces and headdresses, luxury sandals and royal headrests. His status was far higher than that of a mere dyer of leather, and the range of his expertise accounts for his high rank at the neo-Assyrian court…
Both the colour and the surface effect of beading are taken up in the Greek translation of the Hebrew as huakinthinos. The covering for the tabernacle in the Pentateuch with its underlay of red, madder-dyed leather has its precise counterpart in craft materials from Isin and Mari around 2000-1800 BCE. The sandals in Ezekiel have their counterpart in the Amarna letters and in the grave goods from Tutankhamun’s tomb.
(Oh, and that name of Abraham’s nephew, Tachash? It most likely means an embroiderer of leather with beads, just like the name of his other nephew, Tevach, means butcher.
Beaded hides. Q.E.D
